Some examples of bad arguments used by Environmentalists/Anarchists/Conservatives (I consider myself all three of these positions, and I don't consider them to contradict each other) are:
-Biotechnology doesn't work. This is a famous example that was used by Greenpeace to protest the Golden rice project.
Greenpeace wrote back in 2005 for example:
The media hype was more robust than the science, however, and our analysis revealed that people would need to consume 12 times more rice than normal to satisfy the minimum daily adult requirements of Vitamin A. Subsequent studies have questioned the very notion that Golden Rice would be effective in addressing Vitamin A deficiency.Of course the solution to this came very rapidly. Golden rice 2.0 was invented, which produced 23 times more Beta Carotene than the original version, and hence you would get plenty of vitamin A by just consuming a bit of rice. Oops!
-Biotechnology is dangerous. This is another argument used by opponents of biotechnology. This may very well be true, the idea that biotechnology is dangerous, but what does it matter? Has the danger of something ever stopped us from carrying out a policy?
Nuclear weapons were dangerous, and we detonated them. Fossil fuels are dangerous, and we burn them. Nuclear power plants are dangerous, and we build them. Cell phones are dangerous, and we give them to our children. The argument that GMO's are dangerous will never work, because opponents will simply point out that not using GMO's is dangerous for our health as well. As an example, the blindness caused by vitamin A deficiency is causing massive harm to people.
It is very possible that GM technology will one day create a kind of superweed that will run rampant and spread throughout the environment, but the fact of the matter is that people simply do not care.
Of course, the problem is also that as more studies are done, people may reach the conclusion that GM food is safe. This is of course not necessarily the truth, as the negative health effects may take decades to occur.
Hence, if anti-GMO activists go around predicting cancer and infertility from GMOs, and the cancer and infertility don't happen, people will consider the anti-GMO movement to be the losers of the debate.
-Genetically modified crops centralize power. This is true for now, but it might not be true in the future in the same way it is today. The price of genetic modification is dropping rapidly, and for all we know, 20 years from now, farmers might be able to genetically manipulate their own plants against local pests!
It is also not a very special argument. Every technology centralizes power at the cost of local farmer's autonomy. As an example, the tractor centralizes power, pesticides centralize power, irrigation centralizes power, all of these innovations centralize control. How many people are willing to ban pesticides because they centralize control?
A principal opposition to all biotechnology is required
So, how then should we attack biotechnology, if none of these methods above work? Should we even be critical of biotechnology to begin with, or should we just accept it?
The answer is that yes, we should oppose biotechnology. We should oppose all forms of biotechnology, and we should seek to outlaw all genetic scientific research, whether it can save lives or not.
We should do this, for the following reason:
Biotechnology is an infringement on the dignity of life.
I would explain this argument as following, based on the famous French Christian Anarchist Jacques Ellul's book, "The Technological Society".
Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, a new way of thinking has emerged on our planet. This led to the development of a technological society that is rapidly expanding across our globe. Technology is the main determining factor in our modern environment.
The level of technology in a society has the largest impact on the way our we lead our lives, more so than location or culture, or even political system. Your life today is more similar to the life of a man in Saudi Arabia than it is to the life of a man in your own country 200 years ago.
The Technological system functions by rationally analyzing our environment through experiments, and choosing the most efficient pathway by which to carry out an operation, at the cost of everything else.
The great God of the modern technological world is efficiency. Things have to be efficient, and to be efficient they have to be predictable and consistently yield the same result.
Humans suffer from life in a technological environment, as they do not like living predictable lives with predictable jobs. Hence, the technological society inevitably produces an entertainment industry that is meant to keep them pacified and happy.
This is not the result of a conspiracy, it is the result of efficiency, as economies that manage to get people to work an hour extra in exchange for a new iPhone will outperform economies that don't. Hence such economies will dominate other economies, and expand their culture.
Because the technological system functions by rational means, it seeks to find the single most efficient solution to every situation. As an example, whereas people once build their homes of whatever was locally available to them, people now buy building materials, and end up living in very similar homes.
Similarly, education is transformed, and becomes a technique that guides children along their emotional development by the most efficient means it can think of. Hence, diversity is lost, and schools increasingly begin to teach the same lessons to children, through the same methods.
Human life itself becomes technologically transformed, and every person in every part of the planet lives the same basic type of life. A child is born, is sent to certain education institutes, while its parents are forced to work.
When the child is somewhere between 16 and 24, it is finished with its education, and begins to work until it is 67 for a boss, after which it is allowed to spend its last days at home until it is forced to be removed from its environment by being sent to a nursing home.
There are differences, but differences are minor. A black person will wear black style clothing in his free time, and listen to black style music on his way to his job, while a white person will wear white style clothing in his free time and listen to white style music on his way to his job. The differences therefore become differences of superficiality.
In pre-industrial times, differences between areas were larger. In a desert environment people lived nomadic, while in a fertile environment people lived as farmers. In some places people married young, while it others they married at older age. Societies were more autonomous, because there were not that many decisions that had to be made at a central level.
Furthermore, people had more freedom in things that matter, because they were not subjected to technology. As an example, a man could grow whatever food he wanted on his farm, this was his own responsibility. Similarly, parents could raise their children in whatever way they felt like.
Now, what does all of this have to do with biotechnology? The answer is as following:
Technology has homogenized our entire cultures so for. Biotechnology will do what technology did to our cultures, on a genetic level, to all life on our planet.
Instead of being a product of random chance and the environment in which living organisms are born, biotechnology will cause living organisms to become the predictable product of efficiency. Hence, they will have no freedom or dignity left.
Our food has reached a stage at which it no longer resembles anything natural. It is now simply the product of whatever happens to be most efficient. If we can get the taste of vanilla using vanillin, a chemical found in vanilla that can be synthesized in large amounts at a low cost, we will eat ice cream with vanillin instead of vanilla.
Similarly, we use chemical sweeteners in our food, such as Aspartame and HFCS instead of sugar, which itself is already an extract of a plant.
Biotechnology promises to take this process a step further, by turning the last plants that we eat into products instead of lifeforms. Instead of eating a plant as it occurs in nature, we will eat plants in whatever way they can be manufactured to be most efficient.
Do not believe that biotechnology will simply stop at Golden Rice, which is Rice with Beta-Carotene added. The reason is because population growth and environmental destruction will simply be able to continue because of Genetic Modification. If we can feed 500 million more people through GMO crops, the global population will rise by 500 million more people.
Scientists are now planning to increase levels of other micronutrients in rice as well, to artificially add Omega 3 fatty acids to Soy, and to produce new plants that are capable of fixating their own nitrogen from the atmosphere.
The end result will be that life on planet Earth will be transformed into something completely new, the product of efficiency. Golden Rice already doesn't look like rice, and this will be the case for all of our food in the future.
If you pursue Golden Rice, when will you stop? If you can genetically increase yields of Golden Rice and save another 10 million lives, you will be forced to do this as well. If you admit to one modification, you will have no leg to stand on to stop the next modification, because the plants you eat will already be unnatural. With no purity left to save, there is little reason to stop.
Of course the real problem is not the application of biotechnology to food crops. The real problem is the application of biotechnology to human beings, which is already happening.
We are currently eliminating genes that cause inherited genetic problems, such as breast cancer. If a woman had a gene that causes about a 60% chance or so of breast cancer, the gene will be eliminated from her offspring by not implanting any embryo that carries such a gene.
If we can do this with breast cancer genes, there will be little that will stop us from doing the same with dementia genes, heart disease genes, autism genes and just about any other genes. Already tests are being developed that can detect autism in the womb and allow you to abort your autistic child.
The question however is, how can you be sure that the child will grow up to be fully autistic? It is not unthinkable that the child you would have given birth to may have been "on the spectrum" without having classical autism. Similarly, medicine is now being given to some pregnant women that will as a side effect reduce the chance that their daughter will be lesbian.
But aren't all these inventions great? Wouldn't a child be happier if it was not autistic and not lesbian*, and never gets breast cancer?
The answer is, not necessarily. Humans compare themselves to those around them. Hence, if I were 5 foot 6 and lived amongst the Dutch, I would be unhappy, but if I were 5 foot 6 and lived amongst the Indonesians, I would be quite content.
Similarly, a woman does not gain happiness from being beautiful, but from being beautiful enough to be a desirable mate. If all women have braces, the woman will need braces as well, to live up to the new beauty standard. Similarly, if one day all women have breast implants, breast implants will be part of the new standard for women to obey.
This might seem odd to us now, but the fact of the matter is that most of us would not find the average woman who lived 500 years ago attractive. She had crooked teeth, no makeup, greasy hair and sagging breasts. The standard has simply risen.
Similarly, although we may now be content with a life expectancy of 85 years, if it becomes possible in the future to live to 150, we will feel discontent if we only live to be 85 while our friends live to be 150.
Similarly, if it becomes possible through genetic selection to raise the IQ of your child to what is now considered 130, an IQ of 130 will rapidly become required, to be part of the middle class of society. If a boss can choose between two candidates for a job and one has a 130 IQ while the other is at 100, why would he choose for the latter? Similarly, why would a person date someone with a 100 IQ instead of someone with a 130 IQ, or why would a university choose someone with a 100 IQ, whose chance of dropping out would only be much higher?
It may seem nice to be the only one in the street with a child with a 130 IQ, but this will simply cause your child's 130 IQ to soon become the new normal, similar to how a high school diploma was once sufficient to enter the middle class, while you now need a college diploma as a result of everyone going to college.
Similarly, our personality will change as a result of biotechnology. Since we will soon be able to get rid of autistic children before they are even born, we will also eliminate many children who would otherwise have been "mildly autistic". Such children would 60 years ago spend their entire lives not knowing that they are autistic, mostly living normal lives. Today they would be called mildly autistic. And tomorrow they would never even have been born.
Entire generations are now force-fed Ritalin and Prozac and other drugs, to keep them from becoming depressed or mentally ill. What will stop most parents from eliminating the genetic variations that cause these mental illnesses? There will of course be some who will be diagnosed as likely to become mentally ill in the future, who will actually never become mentally ill. Similarly, some diagnosed with Schizophrenia will never grow up to be Schizophrenic, or will actually grow up as good artists due to their Schizophrenia.
However, how many parents are willing to take the 50% chance their child will be schizophrenic, in exchange for the 0.01% chance that the child will become the next rock star? Not too many I would suspect.
Hence, what biotechnology will inevitably do is reduce human biodiversity. Only those humans will be born, whose genetic code causes their body to be the most efficient in our society.
It is likely that the government will intervene and decide what type of genes can be eliminated, and what can't be, as is happening today. As an example, a government may be unwilling to allow parents to remove the gene that causes their child to become depressed or homosexual.
We can hope that our government will use these new abilities responsibly, but what about the governments of Iran, China, North Korea and other countries? When we discover a gene that raises your IQ by five points, the governments of China, Iran and other countries will also read those studies and be able to do with that knowledge whatever they want to do with it.
The inevitable end result therefore becomes that the government will effectively have control over the genetic makeup of its citizens. And we all know that when government gains control over an area of society, it never relinquishes control, because it becomes impossible for government to relinquish control because of the chaos that would emerge.
As an example, we have gone decades without a ban on hunting elephants and whales, but could we one day eliminate this ban again? There is no good chance of ever eliminating this ban again. Similarly, once a new tax is introduced, it becomes impossible to eliminate the tax.
Hence, we can expect that once the government decides which genes we can eliminate from our children and which genes we can not eliminate, the government will permanently become required to gain oversight over our genetic makeup.
Hence, both Anarchists and Conservatives should oppose ALL forms of biotechnology and scientific research into this subject, because it inevitably gives governments new powers that we do not want our government to have.
*I am not suggesting that lesbianism is wrong or undesirable in people. I am simply suggesting that people may argue that children would be happier if they could be heterosexual like most people.
